India growth in 2013/14 at 5%- Singh
January 8, 2014, 8:40 am

Singh’s government has struggled to boost investment and tame elevated inflation even as Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has repeatedly said he’ll stick to deficit targets [AP]

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday sought to dispel apprehensions of the Indian diaspora on the state of the economy, saying the country was heading towards “better times”.

“We are heading into better times ahead and I would urge you to remain engaged in the future of this country with confidence and optimism,” the Prime Minister said at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, which is the annual Indian diaspora meet in New Delhi.

“Our economy has done well over the past decade. In the nine years since 2004, we averaged a healthy growth rate of 7.9 per cent per annum. There has been no doubt a slowdown in the recent past, and we will probably end this year at the same level as last year with 5 per cent growth,” he said.

Singh’s government has struggled to boost investment and tame elevated inflation even as Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has repeatedly said he’ll stick to deficit targets.

Singh said the ‘negative atmosphere’ is also amplified by the “political contestations in India, which are inevitably louder in the election season” that is now on the horizon.

57 founding members, many of them prominent US allies, will sign into creation the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on Monday, the first major global financial instrument independent from the Bretton Woods system.

Representatives of the countries will meet in Beijing on Monday to sign an agreement of the bank, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. All the five BRICS countries are also joining the new infrastructure investment bank.

The agreement on the $100 billion AIIB will then have to be ratified by the parliaments of the founding members, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a daily press briefing in Beijing.

The AIIB is also the first major multilateral development bank in a generation that provides an avenue for China to strengthen its presence in the world’s fastest-growing region.